George Kuchar, 69, offbeat filmmaker, dies

George Kuchar was perhaps the most prolific and influential filmmaker most moviegoers have never heard of.

With his twin brother, Mike -- and later, alone -- Kuchar made some of the earliest films in the 1960s explosion of underground movies.

Kuchar died Tuesday of cancer at a San Francisco hospice. He was 69.

He often sent up the B-movies of his youth in irreverent parodies with equally campy titles. In the mid-1960s, Kuchar followed "Corruption of the Damned" with a work that came to be regarded as a classic of the alternative scene, "Hold Me While I'm Naked."

The exuberant auteur of the no-budget film had made nearly 220 movies and videos since the 1950s, and his reach spilled over into the mainstream. The Kuchars influenced such filmmakers as Brian De Palma, David Lynch and John Waters, according to the San Francisco Art Institute, where Kuchar had taught for 30 years.

His "remarkable spirit and no-holds-barred approach to filmmaking" inspired students and "the film community worldwide," Charles Desmarais, the art institute's president, said in a statement.

The playfulness of Kuchar's movies also was reflected in the titles of the filmmaking courses he taught after joining the art institute in 1971 -- "AC/DC Psychotronic Teleplays" and "Electro-graphic Sinema."

"He was a goofball and a genius," said Eddie Muller, a writer and film historian who took Kuchar's narrative filmmaking class in the 1970s. "He was so smart, so insightful. He was like the greatest filmmakers -- in a single moment he could size up a person and know how to use that in his art."

Although his work could seem off the cuff, it was marked by a tender lyricism and a love of thundering, canned scores, according to Kevin Thomas, a film critic and former Los Angeles Times staff writer.

"He was a really important figure in underground cinema," Thomas said. "He was part of a movement during a turbulent time, the Vietnam era. Yet his stuff was sweet and fun."

Kuchar's loosely autobiographical "Hold Me While I'm Naked" was about the trials of a low-budget filmmaker whose actress quits mid-movie because she resents going nude in every scene. It mock-seriously questioned the relationship of artist to art and came to be regarded as his masterpiece.

Kuchar's brother is his sole survivor.